The desi Miss Marple makes her debut

History, mystery and a sprinkling of feminism, wrapped effectively in legal casing, and weaved into a delicious whodunit — Sujata Massey’s A Murder on Malabar Hill is a page-turner.

The plot has nothing to do with the infamous Malabar Hill murder case of 1925. This is a through-and-through Bombay story, with a little of Calcutta thrown in, set in the 1920s and embedded in the lives of the city’s Parsi and Muslim communities.

A Murder on Malabar Hill; Sujata Massey; Penguin Random House; Fiction; ₹399

Perveen Mistry, in her twenties, is the only practising woman solicitor in town. Women lawyers in 1920s’ Bombay were not allowed to appear in court. And clients did not believe that a mere woman, albeit with lawyer’s qualifications, could give them legal assistance. Unsurprisingly, Perveen did not have any clientèle. She, therefore, does what’s second-best, assist her attorney father Jamshedji Mistry. She draws up contracts and wills for him and is generally found seated in their office at the Fort in the company of their trusted lieutenant Mustafa.

Bright, young, and full of zest, Perveen longs for real lawyer’s work. Her fight for individuality as the lone girl student on the campus, and a brilliant studentship, had been followed by a relegation to out-of-court assignments; so she is aware it’s a tall order. But she gets lucky soon. When the wealthy mill owner Omar Farid, a long-time client of Mistry Law, dies, the execution of his estate comes to them. And the onus of meeting with his three parda nasheen widows comes to Perveen, only because she is a woman and also a lawyer! Her work is to investigate a strange decision they have taken regarding their entitlements as widows and their due inheritance under the law — a task a gentleman solicitor cannot carry out with women living in seclusion.

So when a murder happens at the site, Perveen is present right in its midst. Should she protect her clients or look for the murderer? A British official in the story tells her, “As the only female lawyer in Bombay, you hold a power that nobody else has”. So she goes right ahead in the direction her heart dictates and brain commands, and takes on the consequences. In addition, her ‘past’ catches up with her, propelling her days into a fast spin and putting her life in peril. This fast spin is typical of Massey’s plots. Her stories never lag. Massey’s previous books have a huge fan-following across countries, especially the Rei Shimura mystery series set in Japan. Her historical fiction The City of Palaces , set in renaissance Calcutta, has shown how the writer can lace the flavours and ambience of a city into a fast-moving plot. Often, the city ends up as a character in her books.

Likewise, Massey recreates the 1920s’ Bombay panorama in A Murder on Malabar Hill . And it’s not just Malabar Hill that comes to life, but the Fort, Elphinstone College, Bruce Street, Bandra beach and Sassoon Library too become backdrops to building the tempo. The Yazadani’s, an Irani café in the book, is reminiscent of the delightful Irani eateries scattered across the city even today. And sitting at her desk for a major part of her day, Perveen brings to the reader a period Bombay that is a joy to the senses. The sights, the smells, the sounds, the tastes and, in this case, the social scene of erstwhile colonial Bombay, are endearingly etched in Perveen’s musings and gallivants across the metropolis.

Bombay’s Parsi population, their life, and the nuances of their personal law, as also the Muslim Personal Law, are a crucial part of the plot. So is the British presence. It’s Perveen’s knowledge of the law, her daring, and intelligence that aid her battle against the odds. Perveen is a tribute to real-life legal dignitaries such as Cornelia Sorabjee and Mithan Tata Lam, India’s first woman lawyers, who fought for the voiceless — women and children — in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Massey makes detailed references to the laws and traditions that keep women a prisoner of patriarchal norms. Of how the law denies justice to a victim just because she is a woman; especially in cases of inheritance, divorce and age for marriage, as also the practice of seclusion during menstruation.

Massey has not employed obvious craft in her writing. She has kept it simple, banking on good old storytelling, and letting the plot lead the reader on. It’s obvious that Perveen is going to come back in a series of books and, perhaps, that’s why establishing her character has been done with such deliberation, in a dual timeline.

The full title of the book is A Murder on Malabar Hill, Perveen Mistry Investigates. The last phrase is the key, and Perveen Mistry, since she cannot be Perry Mason, is about to become the desi Miss Marple, an astonishing new heroine.

Suneetha Balakrishnan is a writer, editor and translator living in Thiruvananthapuram